Having spent a couple of decades splashing both modern and traditional mediums around I can say that alkyds are easier to use and don’t make you feel queasy in the way that prolonged exposure to traditional mediums can do. For this alone, they should be the medium of choice for most modern painters. Alkyds Finally, I have been using Linseed oil since 1988 and have a long relationship with this oil compared to the other mediums. If you are using colours that dry with different finishes (such as GOLDEN Heavy Body Acrylic) you can mix some medium into those paints to give all the colours you are using a uniform finish once dry.

Liquitex Professional Slow-Dri Blending Gel - An acrylic gel medium that slows drying time, boosts workability for up to 40% longer. The medium softens edges and increases blending potential for acrylic paint. If you’re looking for the best glazing medium for oil painting, give linseed oil a try! You might just find that it’s the perfect medium for you. Winsor & Newton Professional Acrylic Mediums - Artist quality acrylic medium for increasing transparency, flow and extending acrylic paint.Doing a wash of colour over a thin layer of beads seems just as effective as mixing a transparent colour in. I made a chart for each of the four groups of mediums. Many water-mixable oil painters like to use M. Graham Walnut Oil Alkyd Medium, which is not a water-mixable medium, but since you use so very little it does not interfere with the water-washability at all. So I added it to all the tests. I also added mixing with just water and neat paint for a baseline comparison.

Changes in sheen are probably an indicator of the combining of the different emulsifiers used in each brand.

Traditional mediums

Modern Paints Uncovered The article is The Performance and Properties of Artisan Water Mixable Oil Colour Compared with Other Oil-Based Paints by Winsor & Newton (pp 53-57). As expected, water was harder to mix in than the mediums were, but flowed fine (and dried more matt).

Flow improver thins acrylic mediums for use with wash techniques and painting over large areas. Applying too much water or too much medium to acrylic paint can cause overthinning, which dilutes the acrylic binder and can leave an insufficient remainder of binder for the pigment. This is not a water-mixable oil medium. I’ve included M. Graham because it is a favourite of WMO painters and it is so fluid that you use very little which then doesn’t interfere with the water wash-ability at all. Once you have finished you art work you can apply an overall glaze to your painting. You can also try glazing your work throughout the painting process to produce delicate colour effects and depth. Winsor & Newton Professional Acrylic Slow Drying Medium - Clear acrylic medium which increases the drying time of colour by up to 4 times when used with Winsor's own artist acrylic paints. Dries with a slight sheen. If you’re using fluid acrylics, then adding the glazing medium won’t affect the consistency of the paint very much.A selection of acrylic Gloss Mediums, adding some is great way to increase the intensity of acrylic colours. You can paint three-dimensional works of art by building up a relief that can then be sculpted, sanded or carved once it’s dry. Modelling paste is also great for collage because you can embed all kinds of objects in the surface. If we define contemporary fine art as being preoccupied with colour and visual design, we can say traditional artists were similarly focused on what mattered to them: optics. Optical painting is essentially the process of building a painting in layers, and you can find out more in a later post. But for the time being let’s focus on what you need to do it: mediums. However, once I’d painted in my muted green/blue mix onto the dark areas, it looked too green, so I introduce a red to balance this out. In my post, 9 Acrylic Blending Techniques, I use glazing medium to create a gradient. I used glazing to create some of the soft edges in this painting. “Cylinder, Pyramid, & Sphere” Acrylic on cavnas. 8″x10″

Self levelling with some flexibility. Best used as for a spray-applied isolation coat. Two parts of GAC 500 mixed with one part High Flow Medium produces a good spraying, fast-drying isolation coat. Useful to hard-edge painters to seal masking tape for cleaner edges. Apply over masking tape. Let dry before applying additional paint layer. GAC 700 Gloss medium will also make paint thinner and more transparent, which is useful if you want to paint thin but brilliant glazes. I’m using a Permanent Alizarin Crimson. Again, this pigment has a great transparent quality, which will also work well in the later glazes.The chart at the top of this post contains transparent glazes on top of stripes of opaque color. The glazes alter the color beneath it. Most of the glazes are rather transparent, but you can use less glazing medium to have a stronger effect. For example, the second yellow from the bottom of the chart is more vibrant that the yellow beneath it. If you add enough glazing medium to the more opaque colors, they will eventually become somewhat transparent too. The Recommended Ratio of Glazing Medium to Paint Because it takes so little medium to modify the paint, you don’t lose the characteristics of the paint. The paint to which you add the medium will be a main factor in the resulting mix. If the paint is fast-drying or matt or fluid – those characteristics will remain and have a big effect on the results. So the same medium mixed with different paints will behave differently. The traditional resins used to make oil mediums are dammar, copal and mastic. All three are natural resins derived from trees, and are combined with a turpentine, a strong solvent and sometimes a few other ingredients to make a medium.